


England's Nettles

by ScherbenByOpium



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-27
Updated: 2013-08-27
Packaged: 2017-12-24 20:40:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/944415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScherbenByOpium/pseuds/ScherbenByOpium
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ten scenes, ten vignettes, the one most important act of Sealand’s short life. Five thousand five hundred words isn’t much of a childhood, though. Well. Tough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	England's Nettles

**Author's Note:**

> (Also on Ffn.)  
> A/N: An experiment on word limits (I count hyphenated words as >1, if I’m wrong then damn), which in some ways is a pain but otherwise, it does give you a lot of excuses, so I’ve found.
> 
> This is also a sort of consolatory second for ‘Reading Between the Lines’, which I am currently scrapping indefinitely despite barely having started. (Don’t tell me that I do this for all my other commitments too. I know, I know, I’m faithless. But that’s the charm of oneshots XD)
> 
> 700 is completely crappy because who the heck am I trying to kid I am no poet. The rest too is crappy but put that thought on hold for a second while I look for an excuse for that. Ohh damn there isn’t one. Sorry.
> 
> 800: Sealand’s eyes: it’s true that at the very beginning he did have passably green eyes. And then they turned blue. (But the eyebrows also sprouted somewhere along the way so he still has a resemblance to Iggy and Himaruya is somewhat excused.)
> 
> This is kinda bleh…
> 
> Enjoy.

(100)

Sealand broke a mirror, once. He didn’t mean to: it had been standing smooth and silver and intact and then it hadn’t, it was lying in thousands of jagged fragments at his feet, a few especially sharp crumbs of glass actually in his feet.

Time had frozen, then, embedding the image firmly into his mind. 

Smashed glass on the linoleum floor. Surely there was more of it than there had been in the mirror to begin with.

Fractured breathing.

His horrified tears falling. As broken as the glass. 

And the futile thought, I’m sorry.

It’s one of his earliest memories.

-x-

(200)  


England’s study has a tall door, and it is always closed.

He’d felt cheated the day he couldn’t turn the doorknob to his bedroom, and he’d looked up whilst he was struggling with it and saw that it was also a tall door. He’d forgotten the problem of the doorknob then, and run through the house with a desperation he didn’t understand and didn't think to, stopping short at every door.

He didn’t notice the housemaid staring when he almost knocked into her, Master Kirkland are you quite all right a mere undertone to the buzz of panic in his ears.

When he’d run off all the steam past every door and ended up back at his own room, he saw that it was open again, obedient once more and waiting for him to walk through it as he liked, and he didn’t question why or how.

He’d felt betrayed that standing at the foot of each and looking up at the flat surfaces of the panels, all were tall, taller than he. 

It didn’t occur to him, when he pushed past his door and into his room, that it was no longer tall.

…England’s study has a tall door. 

-x-

(300)  


He does not remember much about the first time he met England, who was there when the final nail was knocked in and Sealand found that he had eyes that could open, and with them he met the world.

There had been concrete, and that had been the singularly most fascinating thing to Sealand, if only because it was the closest thing to him and wasn’t it only logical to start exploring there and work outwards? Grey, and the closer you looked the more hairline furrows appeared on the surface, the worker’s insignia. When he’d reached out tenuous fingertips, it was colder than he’d expected – though he’s not sure what he’d expected, if anything – and smoother, too, in between the areas of careless scrapings, which were rough to the touch. Birthscars. 

He doesn’t know how he’d gotten to his feet; maybe he hadn’t been standing, then, though his memory, frowning in concentration, says he had definitely been upright (and the next moment it throws its hands in the air and declares no-yes -not-sure) when he’d suddenly been aware of a figure before him – and that had been standing. Definitely.

The expression on his – it’s a he – face is one of surprise, and his mind instantly places this concept into his rapidly increasing store of new experiences. Wide eyes equal surprise.

His eyes are all he can see for a moment, and again there is a jolt of familiar novelty (wait, isn’t that an oxymoron) as he finds he can place the look in them as they lock onto his own (shock, pure shock) as well as the exact shade. 

“They’re green,” the figure says with what he identifies to be a breath of wonder in his voice, and he had marvelled that the figure could read minds.

-x-

(400)  


One day, he is eating breakfast alone again, because England is working, because England is always working. There is a war on.

His toast soldiers are getting cold, and he is vaguely irritated at the housemaid for not knowing this, and coming back to the kitchen to make him some more. But there is a war on, as England says, as England always says, and so he eats them anyway.

It comes to him like any other detail would at seven o’ clock in the morning (England is particular in his routines and he will have Sealand observing the same, so every morning he takes breakfast at seven on the dot even though England never does. But he supposes England can be excused. England can be excused from a lot of things.). He notices it rather than realises it, safe in the satisfaction that nothing is out of order – 

He does not question why the kitchen is exactly the same as it was the previous morning (except it isn’t: the counters are clear and spotless and the cutlery is all laid out correctly but there is only a jug of milk on the table today and no juice because they ran out yesterday when England smashed the pitcher); he does not wonder why it is that the plates just so happen to rest on the table, and not elsewhere. This is the routine already laid out for him, knife-fork-spoon, he and everyone else who goes along with routines that existed before they did because it conveniences them to do so until it becomes habit. And nothing is more convenient than to make the world around you habitual. It saves you from having to be plagued day in and day out by that exhausting faculty they call wonder.

His is not to wonder why, and for now he is content to put that down to be because he is not an Adult (yet). The thought that passes through his mind as he dribbles more orangey-yellow egg yolk onto the grainy brown crust of the toast is just as linear as everything else his eyes touch but do not contact:

England does not like him, he thinks but does not think, and it is no great revelation. The plates are still on the table, the milk is still standing alone by the butter, and he takes another bite of his toast soldier.

-x-

(500)  


He’s always wondered what’s inside England’s study. England doesn’t allow anyone to go beyond the threshold, though he does extend the courtesy to France when the other comes by to visit.

Sealand is curious to know what the secret is, but he bites his tongue and doesn’t ask because England didn’t like it when he did that. Until, that is, the morning England has breakfast with him, and Sealand can’t help but question him. A rare occurrence indeed.

So he asks, even when England glares at him and stabs his fork down hard, certainly harder than was necessary. So he asks, even when the tiredness and frustration and anger – a disastrous combination, reeking of danger – become more and more apparent as England snaps at him first to eat his breakfast in silence, then, to just shut up. 

But Sealand, eyes glimmering, doesn’t comply, feeling the spark of adventure and the little shocks of electric danger that makes the hairs on his arms stand on end and almost makes him giggle nervously as he throws more and more tinder into the fire.

He’s so entranced that he doesn’t see the blur coming. He doesn’t feel it, either, not at first, stiff with the first emotion he’d ever acquainted himself with, pure paralysing undiluted shock, eyes wide as he stares at England like he did back on the concrete the first time, a burn creeping to his cheek, the fire he’d provoked knowing no master and kept rising and rising and even when he tried to take it back didn’t stop.

He’s had worse from falling from the swing in the back garden, from tripping and spraining his ankle, from cutting his hand on shards of broken glass, but he can’t bring his trembling fingers to his face and he can’t even speak.

England, half-standing across the table, stays perfectly still for a moment, hovering just above his seat. Then he pushes the chair back, the legs scraping across the floor, and walks away without once looking back. He leaves the chair carelessly haphazard, his breakfast unfinished, and Sealand still unable to move.

Later, he won’t speak of it or show he acknowledges it happened at all, and Sealand would wonder if it really was so unimportant to him that he’d discarded it from his mind, like that chair on the kitchen floor, like the remains of his breakfast, which grew cold and were later thrown away by the housemaid. A terrible waste, it seemed to him, especially when little pellets of words such as ‘thrift’ and ‘rationing’ popped from the radio every evening without fail (and always always somewhere around the mantra of warwarwar he was so used to), but then, maybe it was just part of the surreal world everyone talked about but fell short of the three of them here in the countryside, like the flashes of fire he can sometimes see over the hill, but never reaches him.

It doesn’t matter. He never asks of the study again.

-x-

(600)  


Sealand hates having nightmares. They make him thrash around his bed at night until, thankfully, he’s jolted awake, more often than not by having hit his head against the wall. They make him scream, silently, it seems, because he’s never been saved, and when he wakes there’s little proof of it save for the dryness in his mouth. He could just as easily have slept with his mouth open, which technically he did, but it wasn’t a peaceful sleep and he knows that because they make him frightened.

There’s nothing for him to be frightened of. Even when he thinks as hard as he can about it, he can’t come up with anything. Losing England? England wasn’t the type to get lost. As England sometimes tells him to do. The house falling down on them? But why would it? The war? He lived in one and there was nothing frightening about his life.

He can never remember them to know. When he sits bolt upright, covers noosing around him like so much bindweed, the cool air turning his sweat cold and unpleasant on clammy skin, all he can remember is the fear.

Silence has a sound, a sort of humming in his ears that makes him wonder what real silence is like. He breaks it with his breaths, loud and irregular.

His own room is too small, and as it’s not monsters (then what?) he’s afraid of he creeps along the corridor into England’s room. Strange as it seems, fear has inspired a reckless sort of courage into him, and he isn’t worried that England will be very righteously irritated at him for waking him at this ungodly hour, and will throw him out: in fact, it doesn’t matter whether England’s actually in there or not, only that it’s England’s room, and that counts for something.

He wouldn’t have nightmares in England’s room, he’s sure of it.

England never has nightmares. It doesn’t occur to him that England might just be remarkably good at hiding them.

It’s dark, so dark that he wouldn’t be able to see his hand even if he put it directly in front of his face. England must have drawn the curtains.

Despite being barefoot, it takes a few moments of standing stationary, wondering what next to do, now that this particular lion had turned out to be no harm at all, to realise that instead of the hard, smooth floorboards of the rest of the house, England’s room had a carpet. Strange, he’s caught glimpses inside before (it’s not so covetously guarded as his study, though he’s still not allowed in) and he’s never noticed that detail.

He crouches down cautiously, and gropes around him with his hands. To his left, the varnished wooden surface of something fairly tall – a chest of drawers, maybe – and nothing within arm’s reach to the other side, or in front of him. He crawls tentatively forwards. Slow going.

It seems that he’s done what’s probably the stupidest thing he could possibly do, because now he realises he can see the room again and that must mean there’s light, but wait, when did that happen?

A good answer would be when he was asleep.

Oh. Oh. He fell asleep. On the floor (carpet!) in England’s room, no less. When he should have been snugly tucked up in his own.

Clever.

And – dare he ask – who would go into England’s room to make it light? Because the curtains were drawn, something he’d already established, and for whatever reason England seemed to have blackout curtains in his room aaand he was rambling.

Ah. England.

-x-  


(700)  


England is an awful cook. 

There’s nothing more fun than realising that England is not so very  
Perfect, after all.  
(It’s also a little bit scary. England has been perfect for so long.)  
But he likes to think that he’s outgrown England  
Or at least, he’s growing. Which he is, he only has to look at the scratches on the wall  
Up and up like a little chalk ladder or a beanstalk and England, will I ever live in a castle of my own?  
(Don’t be stupid.)

When France comes around  
England takes him into his study and they stay in there for ages and ages and  
When France is around  
England is different and he can hear them talking and laughing and give me back my England.  
When France stays around  
For the evening as he sometimes does, England lets him cook and it’s  
Delicious.

(…He hates France.)

When America comes around –  
– He only did that once –  
But why  
Did it have to make  
England  
So  
Happy.

It’s not fair  
America gave him a candy.  
It’s not fair  
But he ate it.  
It’s not fair  
And he couldn’t taste it because his mouth was burningburningBURNING AND

(…He hates America.)

He wishes that America could be killed in the war  
Because a lot of people are killed in the war.  
There are lists in the papers, Missing and Killed In Action and Sealand thinks it’s not fair  
That it has to be so long before it’s America’s turn.  
The radio tells him  
That he should pray for the dead because they are heroes  
But the only real soldier he’s ever seen is America and  
he’s no hero.

(England is his hero.  
But recently he’s thinking  
That England doesn’t act much like a hero either.  
…Do heroes have to be good at cooking?)

He wishes  
England would pay attention to him because  
He tries so hard to get England’s attention but  
England never pays attention to him because  
He never gets England’s attention but  
WHY?

They live  
In a nice little gingerbread house  
The windowpanes are white like icing sugar  
The walls are made of blocks of sponge cake  
(But they’re very very hard and not very sweet)  
The pipe for the rainwater is a black liquorice straw  
And sometimes he lies awake at night and thinks that maybe  
England is an evil witch  
And maybe  
England will eat him up tomorrow  
And maybe  
England would like him better then.

(England England will you eat me? Don’t eat me eat me don’t eat me eat me WILL YOU EAT ME)

England says  
That they live here because it’s safe.  
England says  
That he lives here so he won’t get hurt.  
England says  
That there are bombs falling in London and the children are getting hurt and he’s lucky and  
It hurts.  
Sealand guesses it means that Evacuation doesn’t really work.  
England glares at him (what did he do now) and says it does.  
England says a lot of things.

(Eat your breakfast and don’t be stupid.)

It hurts when  
He gets stung by nettles  
But he never remembers to avoid them anyway and Sealand supposes that he’s  
Pretty stupid.  
It hurts when  
He realises that England likes France and England likes America  
But he never manages to avoid them and Sealand supposes that he’s just that  
Unlikeable.  
It hurt when  
England hit him (just that once)  
But, well,  
He deserved it.

(England, England, look at me!  
England England, are you looking at me?  
England England, why won’t you look at me?  
England ENGLAND, PLEASE JUST LOOK AT ME!  
WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO TO MAKE YOU LOOK AT ME!  
I’m looking. What is there to see?)

When England doesn’t look at him at all  
Or gives him that condescending look  
That scornful look that says  
‘Oh but what do you know you’re Sealand and you know, you’re also nothing  
haha’  
Except without the laughter  
(Though Sealand imagines it’s there nevertheless).  
And that  
Hurts most of all.

Or maybe it’s smoke that hurts most of all  
Thick and choking  
Because he can’t breathe  
Black and suffocating  
From England’s awful cooking

And the smoke, it makes him want to cry.

-x-

(800)  


Sealand never thought mirrors could lie.

He’s terrified when they do.

––

He’s always liked his eyes. The rest of him, not so much: his skin is too prone to tearing or discolouring when he plays outside, and he can’t even explain how he got most his scratches and bruises. His limbs are too small, and he has to strain to reach what England and the housemaid can with ease. It’s difficult even to get himself a plate for a snack, or a glass for some water. His fingers are not dexterous enough, and they often betray him into making blunders dropping the cutlery, for example, on just the evening England takes dinner with him.

His hair is too pale a blond, and much too limp and straight to messily stick up as he wishes it would.

But his eyes are the colour of something beautiful, he can’t see it from here but he could when he first opened them. Sun and skies and sea, and he has them all. Blue and green and bright. With focus on the ‘green’ part, because who does he know with green eyes…?

England’s eyes are emerald green, he can proudly label, see, he’s been working hard at his adjectives. Emeralds are precious jewels, and with some thought he’s decided that it makes sense, because if there’s less of something, then it must be precious: grass was green, lots and lots of different shades of green and sometimes England would point out to him that it was very nice to look at. (Sealand nods his head and agrees whenever this happens, all the while furiously trying to work out what exactly was pretty about grass.)

But grass wasn’t precious, this at least was safe to say. So it must be because there’s too much of it, certainly more than Sealand needs.

It makes sense: emeralds are precious, because England’s eyes are emeralds and England’s the only person he knows who has eyes like that. France has blue eyes, blue like the sky on a blinding summer’s day, blue like sapphire. (Another adjective.) Sapphire wasn’t as precious as emerald, because America also had blue eyes: blue like a cheap china doll. Sealand has one. He never plays with it. Dollies are for girls, aren’t they?

The housemaid has brown eyes, and for a moment Sealand is caught, because no one else has brown eyes, either, does that make her as precious as England? But then the problem is solved: brown eyes aren’t so beautiful, and there’s no precious jewel that he knows of that is brown. 

Since his eyes are bluish green he reasons that this places him one under England, but above France and America, and this never fails to bring a feeling of vindication. 

It also meant that he was closer to, more like, England than anyone else.

Oh, yes, he loves that touch of green in his eyes.

––

There’s something wrong. Very wrong. There’s something wrong with his eyes. Something very wrong indeed.

When he stands in front of the bathroom mirror he can see an expression of horror on his own face, his lips are parted like they’re about to scream and his eyes, the centre of his attention, are wide, too wide, so wide that they are what would be comically round in situations far removed from this and he can see the whites but white isn’t the least of his worries and white isn’t the colour that has him so horrified –

It’s blue.

No, come on, he’s doing so well at English lessons, what with the adjectives and whatnot. He can do better than that.

They’re blue.

At first he thinks, wildly, that it’s the mirror’s fault. The mirror can lie, after all, and that’s what it’s doing. His eyes are green, fine, bluish green but green nonetheless and how could it be that they’ve suddenly turned blue?

The next thing he thought was that there was something wrong with his eyes – apart from the fact that they were blue, that is. He’d gone to the window, and weakly leant against the glass: no good. The grass on the hill was green, the grass on the garden was green, the grass everywhere was green and so were the leaves on the trees and the dandelions and whatever else. 

It wasn’t that he saw everything green as blue, then, although it could easily have been something else, maybe that he saw everything bluish green as blue?

He debated locking himself into the bathroom forever, unsure if he could keep the secret. In the end he just went about his day ducking his head and trying to hide, until England surprised him with giving him a half-smile – a smile that was only half for him – and said,

“Yes, it’s strange, isn’t it?”

-x-

(900)  


“Ow!”

Momentarily dropping his rather grubby stick, (which was a pistol, thank’ee very much, and a fine one it is too), a byproduct of one of the apple trees in the garden doing the exact same thing in the previous night’s storm , only to have Sealand pick it up and commence in a glorious game of Cowboys and Indians (albeit by himself), he snatches his hand towards himself and awkwardly cradles it somewhere near his stomach, rubbing hard with the other at the affronted skin in an attempt to soothe it. ‘Attempt’ being the operative word here, because it seems to get worse. The initial sting was of sharp, hot pain – like when he burnt his wrist baking an apple pie (from that same tree that also bore pistols, as well as crunchy yellow-russet-red fruit), or when he’d nicked his finger picking up the pieces of the mirror he’d broken, frantically trying to put it back together because he was going to get in so much trouble – but that had taken a backseat to the persistent itch that was spreading under his skin, aggravated by his fingernails and now letting him know that it was not pleased.

He peers ruefully at his attacker, a green thing with leaves that are furred if he looks at it from a certain angle, and stands at mid-calf. It’s an Indian ambush, he thinks half-heartedly to himself, but there is no answering thrill within him, his interest in the fabricated game already faded away, stung into painful reality. He doesn’t even look back to his pistol, just a damp, sad stick again in the sludgy mud as he turns and picks his despondent way back to the house.

Nothing seems to be going right for him today, because just as he’s approaching the door that leads in to the pantry, he’s suddenly aware, with surprising clarity and an almost detached interest, that he’s falling.

It’s very quick.

One moment he’s reaching for the handle, the next he’s seeing the sharp edge of the stone step. Two images in perfect clarity, and with not much inbetween, except oh, I’m falling. Handle. Step. How did he get th– 

That’s before his head hits it.

He’s dazed when the housemaid rushes over to lift him up, her face flushed from the oven and hair in great disarray, a few wet strands sticking to her forehead and the sides of her face in glistening brown question marks.

“Oh, Master Kirkland, what happened?” she frets, as she looks, distressed, to her hands for a few moments as if they could answer or help her. They’re powdered with flour, two white gloves, hints of pinkish flesh peeping through at the thinner spots. She dusts them off distractedly on the front of her apron, and half leads, half carries him to a chair at the table where she sits him firmly down and bustles off in search of something to patch him up with, telling him not to move.

He has no intention to, resting a hand on the table. To be honest, he feels a little guilty to see her worry – not because he particularly cars for the housemaid, she’s a servant who is here for most part of six and a half days a week, but because he feels like an imposter, letting himself be fussed over like he was sick, which he actually doesn’t feel he is. His head feels a bit strange, like it hadn’t quite caught up with the rest of him and the past few minutes had passed too quickly, but that’s all. It doesn’t even hurt.

When he touches his head, just to reaffirm that there’s really nothing wrong, he’s surprised when his fingers come away with just a little bit of red on them, clear and watery at the edges like jam sometimes was. He doesn’t have long to ponder over it, because a clink, ringing deliberate – a rim of china on the counter – has him jerking his head up to the sight of England standing in the doorway, just having set down his used teacup. He didn’t hear his footsteps.

Sealand stays quiet, having long since learnt that this is the safest course of actions. He wouldn’t know what to say anyway, he never does around England because he is just so unpredictable, and beneath that, just strange.

“Been through the wars, have you?” England says, striding towards him, an edge of amusement to his tone as his green eyes sweep Sealand over, pausing at first his trousers, stained with grass, then the general patches of mud smeared all over him, not all from his fall: his knees, his side, his elbow, making him horribly conscious of each of those areas in turn. Only when England reaches his chair and stops there do they travel up to his head and linger there. The scrutiny takes much too long, and is intensely uncomfortable. Sealand stares at his lap, trying not to fidget.

Suddenly fingertips brush his hand, outstretched on the table, and Sealand looks up, startled. They ghost, gentle and almost pleasant, over the forgotten battle-scar: an angry-looking red rash, the island of swelling rising somewhere near the centre, which is certainly worse than the little pale spot it was when Sealand last looked at it.

“Nettles,” England pronounces softly, and the look in his eyes is unreadable.

-x-

(1,000)  


‘Why’ has fast become Sealand’s favourite word, because as he’s found out, he can tack it onto any phrase and out comes a perfectly reasonable question. Even standing alone, he finds he can apply it to many situations – ‘go to bed’. ‘Why?’

It’s a pity, then, that there’s no-one around willing to answer these fantastic questions of his. Why.

He tried the housemaid first, but all she did was to shoo him out of the room with a wave of her feather duster and a vague smile. It was a lovely April morning, why didn’t he go play outside?

Lovely it was not. A miserable drizzle had set up, and the leaves drooped and dripped despondently. The garden was pervaded by the sharp smell of rained-on vegetation and the pungent, bitter scent of wet earth, and Sealand didn’t particularly care for either. It’s not that he hates the rain, particularly: there were some types of downpours that seemed as if the falling planes from last night, wheeling downwards with their bellies and wings ablaze, half-surreal images that he sometimes doubted as part of his dreams, had burnt so fiercely that they’d gashed open the clouds. Those were splendorous – the raindrops were impossibly large, and whipped against the windows like bullets, so hard that he could hear the thwack and see the bloom of water on the glass before it was masked by the constant assault of others. It was an aggressive, unfaltering offensive that gave rise to great grey-white skeins of mist over the fields, until he could hardly see the grassy slope of the hill. Yes, there were those types…and then there was this.

His options: he’d been chased out of his own bedroom, where at least there were toys (though he didn’t want to play with them, even planes and trains and toy soldiers got boring after a while) and books (though he didn’t feel like reading, that was something England would do, a ridiculously thick volume with a name he couldn’t even understand in one hand and a cup of tea, another thing Sealand was none too fond of, in the other).

Moping, he turns to his last resort: England. Chances were he was in his study, busy because yes, he knows the drill, there is a war on. When wasn’t there a war on? He can’t go outside, properly outside, not just into the garden, because there’s a war on. He can’t play with anyone else, because there isn’t anyone else to play with, because there’s a war on. England has no time for him, not when he catches a cold, not when he scrapes his knee, not when he’s made a painstaking drawing or model of a Spitfire with paper or cardboard and colouring pencils that are rapidly dwindling to stubs all by himself. Because there’s a war on. 

Didn’t anyone else get bored of playing war every day?

– – 

“England, why is there always a war on?” Sealand said, as soon as he burst into the living room.

Sealand wouldn’t be entirely truthful if he said that finding England stretched out lazy and content as a cat on the rocking chair in front of the fire happily sipping from a little porcelain cup while his other hand leafed through a book (from what he could see from it, the script was extremely small and dense) was a surprise.

England barely looked up, although Sealand could have sworn that England’s light smile diminished a little. “Sealand, kindly go and pester someone else.”

Well, that was harsh. A number of retorts ran through Sealand’s head, namely that there wasn’t anyone else to go to, actually, and that was why he was here in the first place, except England never listened to him anyway. But these tempting, childish impulses aside, Sealand’s collected some wisdom, at any rate.

At least enough that he decides to be tactical, and try a different tack. “England,” he wheedled, trying to sound as serious as he could, “why is there a war on?” He could hardly stop himself from grinning in smug triumph when this caught England’s attention. 

For a second, England looked as if he was about to answer, brow furrowing in thought as he almost unconsciously sat up and leant forwards, resting a contemplative elbow on his knee. The moment passed. 

“I’m not quite sure,” he substituted, not even attempting to cover the evasiveness in his tone. He looked at Sealand, though – without the usual screen of annoyance or preoccupation or outright anger – actually looking, a little sharply, a little shrewdly, as if suddenly aware that Sealand might just have a head on his shoulders, instead of a mop of blond hair and a mouth that could never stay blessedly quiet.

Sealand wondered if that look meant he was in trouble, and with the none-too-comforting feeling of digging his own grave, said, not a little warily: “I wish the war was over.” 

It must have been the day for England to give him odd looks, because another one came his way, but with a sinking feeling – like after he’d taken a misstep on the stairs, and without warning was walking into thin air where he’d faithfully, foolishly believed to be another step – he notices the all-too-familiar condescension, England’s speciality: amusement and irritation and derision all in one, delivered in that little, scornful flick of his eyes.

“Why,” England said mockingly, “so you could have life back to what it was before?”

Sealand didn't know how to answer that one, and he was certain that England was being deliberately cruel: he knew that Sealand couldn’t defend himself, when it was put that way.

“Why can’t I be normal?” he asked instead, and even to himself it sounded like a pathetic bleat.

England quirked his brow at him, his expression becoming well-nigh undecipherable again, and gave a little puff of a sigh. 

“Because, Sealand you’re not normal.”

(Maybe that was England’s way of saying he’s special.)

-x- 

END

**Author's Note:**

> ........


End file.
